


Strip Search

by Cluegirl



Series: Tryskelion Penitentiary AU [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Prison AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-06 22:38:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10346094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: Half of the Hydra gang inmates break out of the Tryskelion.  That's not the bad part.  The bad part is that they took one Steven Goddammit Rogers along with them, and Bucky is completely Not Okay with that!





	

**Author's Note:**

> " _Send me a "Undress" and I'll write a drabble about one character watching the other get naked_ " was the prompt... but that's not exactly where this went, is it? Muahaha, I do what I want!

“Get up, Barnes,” Correctional Lieutenant Romanoff said as the gloom of Bucky’s solitary cell cracked open with a rattle of keys. “You’re with me.”

“Fuck off, Screw,” he snarled back, not rising from the bunk they’d cuffed him to, even though he’d broken the handcuffs in half once the trank had cleared out of his head. 

But instead of the angry reaction he’d expected (hoped for), the red haired guard just shook her head and stepped back from the doorway. “Get up. and follow me to the infirmary now, or you can wait out the rest of your Solitary before you get to see for yourself that Rogers is okay.”

“You found them?” The words were out of his mouth, lurching and hopeful even as he scrambled to his feet. “You got him back?” Any other day, he’d have stopped to kick his own ass for giving voice to the idea that Steve Rogers being anywhere near the Tryskelion Penitentiary was a good idea -- today he was just too fucking relieved to manage it.

“We found them, James,” she answered, smiling and soft in the way she only ever seemed to get around Steve Rogers, the tiny maniac who couldn’t seem to help collecting shards of long-lost loyalty in the hardened bastards and bitches who filled the pen around him. He seemed to find the gleaming threads of gold lurking hidden in the shittiest of them, and wind them up around his plug-knuckled hand like they were treasure, not trash, and yeah. Yeah, they’d pretty much follow the mouthy little shit anywhere for that, wouldn’t they?

“There was a pileup on the Thru-Way,” she told him as Bucky scrambled along behind her toward the infirmary, her voice clear and loud enough to carry the news across the length of the cell-bound inmates as they went. “It looks like Rumlow crashed the bus into a fuel tanker, then through the guardrail over the Murder Creek Ravine. Killed himself and three of his crew before Rogers managed to climb down and pull the rest of those assholes out of the river.”

She didn’t mention how Steve had gotten free of whatever bindings and guard Rumlow must have had on him, or how it was Steve hadn’t gone over the rail with the rest, and so it served to reason that Steve hadn’t been restrained at all at the time of the crash. Which honestly, wasn’t all that hard to predict for anybody who knew how hard and mean Rogers could fight when he was cornered. The only real question was how many of the ‘crash’ victims had actually stopped breathing before Rumlow’s getaway bus hit the ravine, but it wasn’t a question many people inside the Pen were likely to wonder all that hard about.

*Attaboy, Stevie,* Bucky thought with savage pride, and a surge of the worry he hadn’t quite been able to quell since the Tryskelion Pen had gone into lockdown with a dozen of its Hydra inmates, and the Avengers’ Captain not inside it. *That’s my vicious fucking Punk!* 

Aloud though, he just tsked loudly over the mutter that went up from the cells at the news. “Well that was downright clumsy of him. But I guess that’s why Hydra always had to set Brock’s bank jobs up with someone else at the wheel -- he never could multi-task under pressure.” The muttering grew as it spread, and the clatter of their shoes on the metal stairs covered the question Bucky asked quietly, angrily from the still ice-locked part of his gut. “Everyone accounted for in the pickup?”

Romanoff shot him a knowing glance and smirked as she keyed open the infirmary doors. “Relax, Soldier. We got the full set.” Then she opened the door onto a pandemonium of blood, road slush, scorched cloth, rubber and skin, and deisel fuel as medics and trustees bustled from cot to cot like bees. Some of the Hydra men lay still in their bed restraints, angry and bleeding, but alive beneath the swarm of medics. Others lolled like heavily sedated dolls beneath white cotton padding and oxygen feeds, still and soft in their curtained alcoves. Still more were thrashing, shouting threats and pleas through their tears as the orderlies -- Thor, Stark, and Rhodes, among others -- tried to wrestle them into bindings without tearing burned and blistered flesh. Bucky swallowed hard and shivered as a creeping phantom ache bled up the arm he didn’t have to throb in the stump it had left behind.

“Of course some will be permanently retired once the M.E.’s done with them,” Romanoff added with a nod toward four neglected gurneys against the far wall, each bearing a long, and very still black bag. Part of Bucky wanted to go and open the bags, make sure Brock really was inside one of them, but an even bigger part of him keened and pleaded against the chance that it would somehow be Steve’s ruined face he’d find first.

“Barnes,” Sam Wilson’s voice snared his attention, and chased the looming shadows from the corners of his vision. Bucky looked up to find the man in orange scrubs and purple gloves waving at him from five beds down along the near wall. “Steve’s down here, man. Come on!” And that, finally, broke through the ice-lock of rage and horror that had been clamped around his heart from the first moment his Stevie had failed to show up at the mess hall for lunch. 

Bucky surged forward, ducking Romanoff’s grab without a second thought. He was fully prepared to buldoze his way to Steve’s side with no further questions asked when Coulson stepped into his way and jabbed a nightstick firmly under Bucky’s collarbone by way of a silent warning. It was only one final shred of good sense that stopped him throwing a punch at the guard Captain’s head and getting himself tranked and dumped in Solitary again. Coulson, he forcibly reminded himself, had been looking after Steve’s well-being inside the Tryskelion longer than as Bucky had. Not that that made him feel any better about Coulson coming between them right then. 

“He’s hypothermic, maybe concussed,” Coulson said, ignoring Bucky’s attempt to make him burst into flames with the power of his mind alone. “A few abrasions, but other than that, he seems all right. If you promise to be good, keep your hands to yourself, stay out of the medics way, and don’t cause a scene, you can stay and hear what they have to say about it. Agreed?”

Bucky gave him a nod and made to step around him, but Coulson gave his baton a twist toward the nerve cluster, and cleared his throat. “I need you to use your words, inmate Barnes. Do you agree to stay out of the medics way and let them give inmate Rogers the care he needs?” he said with his mouth, while his eyes added *or do I need to put you into the next cot over and tell them to strap you down before you’ll behave?*

There were days when Bucky would have liked to see him try. Today though, Sam was glaring at him from behind Coulson’s shoulder, his expressive face telling Bucky not to be a dumbass, and Bucky could see Bruce carrying an armload of towels to the bed alcove they had Steve in, and he was sure he could hear Steve’s voice, reedy and peevish through the din, and he just wanted to fucking be there already. 

“I agree Sir,” he managed in his best approximation of respect.

“Deputy Director Hill will be coming around to take his statement,” Coulson said, stepping back with a nod. “Don’t give her a reason to ask why I let you out of Solitary.” Then he waved Bucky past with the blandest of smiles. 

“He’s okay, man,” Sam muttered, falling in step and shoving a pile of clothing into Bucky’s grip as they rushed toward the curtained alcove. “I mean he’s roughed up a little, and half frozen, but I’ve seen him walk off worse. He’ll be fine once they get him...” and he went on like that, but they’d cleared the privacy curtain by then, and Bucky wasn’t listening to Sam anymore at all.

Steve was a sodden twist of golden hair and Sunday sky-bright eyes, half buried and complaining inside a thick swaddling of blankets as some asshole with a flashlight held his chin and told him to quit squinting. “I told you my head’s just fine. One little bump ain’t gonna kill me.” but the shivering he couldn’t quite quell managed to take a lot of the teeth out of his complaints.

“Left iris is dilated, but the right responds to light okay,” the tech told Bruce, who scribbled on a tablet. “Are we sure there was no fracture of that right shoulder?”

Steve groaned, and gave a rattling shake to the arm by which he was cuffed to the bed. “Look, it was just a little dislocation, that’s all. I popped it right back in before the EMTs even got there. Gimmie a little ice, and I’ll be fine.” 

In his head, Bucky pictured Steve wrenching loose his own arm to eel out of a grapple or rope tie and come up swinging a tire iron at his nearest captor’s head. It wasn’t hard to imagine -- he’d actually watched Steve do it in the yard more than once. The sound never got any less appalling, nor did the waxy color Steve invariably turned when it gave way, but just this once, Bucky rather wished he could have seen it all go down.

“You...” the medic blinked, gobsmacked. “Just a... you’re not serious?”

“Why don’t I give him a range of motion test once his core temp’s stabilized,” Sam put smoothly in. “If he fails it, you can talk to the Deputy Warden about moving him to a hospital with a working x-ray facility.”

“You have one here though,” the medic protested, looking more and more panicked by the moment. “An x-ray unit? Don’t you have one here?”

“We had one here,” Bruce corrected sadly. “Then we got Tony Stark here, and now the Department of Defense won’t let us have another one.”

“Um, excuse me?” Tony interrupted, hooking one thumb backward at the bedlam outside. “We need the keys to Spencer’s restraints. If he keeps seizing like that somebody’s gonna need to roll him over...” 

And that proved to be all the poor medic was prepared to take. He muttered something about pay grades and millionaires, and shoved his way out of the alcove, nearly upsetting Barton and his chipped cafeteria mug on the way out.

“Lukewarm water for you, Cap,” he sang out, bouncing his way in between Bruce’s tablet and Sam’s careful unwinding of Steve’s blanket cocoon. “Open up and say ‘yum!’”

“Buzz ompf ,” Steve tried, bubbling a little at the end when Barton got the straw past his insult. He glowered, but sipped before he spat the straw back out again. “Bucky,” he said, and it sounded a hell of a lot like relief in his voice. “You okay?”

“Am I okay?” Suddenly Bucky was laughing, eyes wet, and heart thudding at his ribs like it wanted out. “Am I okay? Why the hell would you even -” his voice caught, ragged in his throat, but he forced the words past, not caring if they tore him bloody now. “I thought you were dead, Rogers! They were gone, and nobody could find you, and three fucking guards were down, and I thought Rumlow broke your neck and stuffed you in a goddamned drain on his way out, and you just...” He clutched Steve’s empty clothes to his chest and gasped a too wet breath. “You just fucking come back?”

“Hey,” Steve said, and reached his pale, blood-scuffed hand as far toward Bucky as he could with the handcuff on him. “Hey.”

“Fuck you, Rogers,” Bucky snarled, and shoved his way through the hovering Avengers to grab that hand and cling on tight, clothes dumping from his grasp, and Barton’s tepid water sloshing down his side. “You asshole,” he choked, leaning close to press his nose to Steve’s clammy temple, breathe him in, and finally, finally get a full breath into his lungs again. “You punk, you... you asshole...”

And then Steve’s free arm came around him, sodden, chilled and shaking, and just enough to keep Bucky from flying apart into a million pieces right there in the clinic. “I’m here, Buck,” Steve murmured in his ear, cool lips brushing the stinging flop sweat from Bucky’s skin with every word, cool hand rubbing circles between his shaking shoulder blades. “I gotcha. I gotcha...”

“Aw, water,” Barton whined somewhere behind him. “Now I gotta go all the way back to the canteen for more.”

“C’mon, Hawkeye,” Bucky heard Stark answer cheerily. “If you hurry and bring a second cup, we can waterboard Garrett while they’re all still distracted.”

“Tony, no,” said Sam and Bruce together as they followed them out.

“Tony, no,” echoed Rhodey from well out of earshot. 

“Fuckin let em,” Bucky grumbled into the curve of Steve’s neck as he nudged his way onto the narrow bed, and cold, wet clothes be damned. “I’d help, but I’m not done kicking your ass yet.”

“Save it for the end of the line, Jerk,” Steve replied with a wet laugh and a shiver that rattled his cuffed wrist again. “I’m way too cold and wet to fight you right now.” Then he coughed, and the rattle it made in his toast rack chest was all it took to slap the meltdown right off Bucky’s mind. 

He sat back on the hospital bed, scowling. “Why the hell are you still in those wet things?”

Steve shrugged with his free arm. “Didn’t wanna work around the handcuffs and leg shackles to cut everything off, I guess.” Then at Bucky’s glower, he grinned. “I’m an Escapee, didn’t you hear? Until they run my bloodwork and figure out that I’m not lying about getting drugged last night, I’m officially a Flight Risk.”

Then, because whatever else Steve Rogers might be, he was, and apparently always would be a smart alec little shit, he tucked his thumb, hollowed his palm, and tugged his hand right out of the cuff so he could scratch his nose. Bucky stifled a bark of laughter and shook his head.

“Yer such a punk, Rogers.” He bent to recover the dry clothing from the floor, and carefully watched Steve’s face as he made himself ask, “What’d they do to you?”

Steve’s face went hard as iron for a second, then he blinked it off, and tucked the rage beneath a stare so earnest you could chip a tooth on it. “Nothing, I don’t think.”

“You don’t think.” 

He shrugged, tucked his arms into the blanket pile and shimmied out of the wet shirt. “Drugs, you know? Blank spots happen. But I didn’t feel roughed up when I came out of it, and I’m pretty sure all the new bruises are from the crash.” He worked the shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor with a splat.

Bucky’s gut gave a twist at that, and he leaned close to pluck at the blankets hiding Steve from sight. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine, Buck-” Steve began, but didn’t really struggle as the blankets peeled away and gave him up white and furious pink to the light. 

Bucky, who had not a day before mapped the latest of Steve’s ever-changing collection of damage, traced the shadows of a brutal grip along the curve of one shoulder, another in four glaring finger-ghosts that spanned his upper arm, and a scuff at wall-impact height on the left cheekbone. It wasn’t damning, but it didn’t put the spectres to rest in Bucky’s mind, either. But he wasn’t ready to force Steve out of those wet, muddy jeans and make him submit to closer scrutiny either. “This from when they grabbed you?” he made himself ask, brushing his thumb over a messy, florid needle-jab blooming in the curve of Steve’s elbow, well shy of the smaller, neater prick the blood-draw must have left. 

Steve grimaced. “That was where they tried to put me on a drip so I’d stay out till they got to their safehouse.” He flexed the arm out of Bucky’s gentle hold, and scooped his wrapping of blankets back up around himself. “Ward’s hopeless with a needle. Missed the vein altogether, so once that first jab cleared out, I was awake enough to hear them talking about the plan.” He grinned then, every ounce the canny little maniac Bucky had fallen for the first day he’d met him. 

“They took me as leverage against you, Buck,” Steve said, watching his face carefully, “Because the Attorney General’s about to bring charges against Pierce any day now, and they don’t know where to find your sister anymore.”

“Becca got away?” Bucky’s breath locked up tight in his chest, shocked and hopeful at the idea.

Steve’s eyes softened into a smile as he gripped Bucky’s hand, and tangled their fingers tight. “She got away, Buck. Witness Protection got her whole family out from under Hydra’s thumb. Rumlow was on the phone with Pierce just before the crash. I heard him say it.”

“Which crash would that be, Rogers?” Hill asked, rattling the curtain loudly on its rail as she swept into the alcove. “The one that put Rumlow through the windshield and into a tanker truck, or the one that put the whole bus over the bridge railing with the other escapees still inside it? Because initial bystander reports seem to think they weren’t the same crash at all.”

Bucky froze, torn between covering Steve’s milky white chest back up, and trying to block Hill’s eyeline to the empty handcuffs on the bed. Steve just gave up a laugh and carried on stripping inside his blanket cocoon, as though the Deputy Warden of the Prison getting an eyeful of his skinny naked ass didn’t bother him in the slightest. “Seems to me,” he said, all wide eyed innocence, “any crashes that happen less than half a minute apart should count as the same crash, don’t you think so Ma’am,”

“I might agree with you, except for how you came out of the whole thing without any sign that you were even in the same crash the other prisoners went through,” she answered, unimpressed. “They’re sporting second and third degree burns, whiplash, concussions, fractures, lacerations, and contusions, while you’re nothing but a little wet, and don’t have diesel fuel on you at all, if the EMTs have it right. How’d you manage that?” Bucky couldn’t help but back up her expectant stare, his all too vivid imagination spinning half a dozen hit scenarios in the space it took Steve to chuck his muddy jeans off the bed.

“Got the door open and bailed out of the bus while they were all distracted by the pileup,” he answered without a second thought. “I had just enough time to roll out of the way before the truck in the other lane jackknifed on the black ice and knocked them right off the bridge.”

“You... you bailed,” Bucky worked his jaw and tried again. “You fucking bailed -”

“At highway speed?” Hill took up his line and added a big dose of skepticism over the outrage. “On a four lane bridge? Rolled across oncoming traffic and into the snowbank just seconds before that tanker started spraying burning fuel everywhere, and you somehow came up without any sign of roadrash to show for it?”

Steve gave her a butter-cool smirk and stuck one scraped and oozing knee out of his blanket nest. Then he wriggled his scuffed and battered knuckles at her too, as if none of them could see the empty handcuff still hanging from the bed frame. “Luck o’ the Irish, Ma’am,” he said grimly.

“And you climbed down into the ravine after them why, exactly?” Hill challenged, but they could all tell she was fighting a smile. Because of course the bus was both in the water, and on fire when Steve Goddammit Rogers decided to go in and pull his kidnappers out, instead of pulling a Dr. Kimball and running for the nearest freight line. “If they kidnapped you, as you claimed, why wouldn’t you leave them to their comeuppance?”

Steve shrugged, and flipped the blankets back up over his pale, bony shoulder. “Due Process, Ma’am. If I left them in that ravine to drown, or die of the fumes or the cold, well they’d all have missed their appeal dates, and lost any chance at acquittal, wouldn’t they?”

Bucky had to smother a grin at the realization that the little idiot had let himself be recaptured and hauled back to the Pen, and it sure as hell hadn’t been for the benefit of the Hydra scum that had kidnapped him in the first place. He had something on them -- something big. Something important enough that he knew Bucky would have to hear it from him.

“And so when I take the statements of the other escapees, they’re going to support your version of events, and not, say, claim that you violently incapacitated them all, and then engineered the crash trying to kill them?” Hill asked, amusement at war with distaste in her face now.

Steve examined his grubby, battered hand for a moment. “Well, I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to get them all out. It was what, 12 degrees last night, give or take? Could be some of them got a little banged up some while I was hauling them out of the burning bus? I mean anything’s possible, right?” 

“Where you’re concerned, Rogers, I’m starting to believe that’s true,” she said, reaching for the alcove curtain with a shake of her head. “Do you think it’s possible for you to get some pants on before I have to explain to Warden Fury what the hell all you Avengers are doing out of your cells during what’s supposed to be a full lockdown?”

Steve pretended to consider this. “That depends: is he on a phone call with the DA, or giving a full on press conference? Because the Warden has been known to hang up on Attorneys before, and I wouldn’t want to promise something I couldn’t-”

“I’ll get him dressed, Ma’am,” Bucky cut in as Coulson peeked in past the curtain with a meaning glare. “Don’t worry. Soon as he stops shivering, I promise.”

“See that you do,” she said, and then whirled on her heel as a high pitched whine started up from across the infirmary. “Goddammit! Who unlocked the crash cart?! Odinson, you put those paddles down right now!” And she was off, Coulson half a step behind her.

“So...” murmured Steve under the pandemonium, “Gonna help me get into my pants, huh?”

And Bucky shrugged, climbing back onto the cot and shouldering Rogers down under his sheltering sprawl. “Eventually,” he said, lips close against Steve’s scraped cheek as he settled down around him, “When I’m done kicking your ass...”

**Author's Note:**

> Why yes, my beloved poison dart frogs, yes it HAS been awhile since I've posted fic around here. If you imagine that real life has been complicated and uncooperative, you're imagining it right, and as such, I am in no way above pointing out that comments give me life, and make me feel all writey and full of prose.


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